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Pieman. Biggest audience of all was attracted by the one speaker who was paid to appear, a redhaired, modest young man named Monroe "'Boston'' Strause, the current sensation of the pastry world. Son of a Los Angeles flour miller named Boston Monroe Strause, he uses his middle name as a kind of trademark. First in partnership with his Uncle Mike in the M. & M. Pie Co. of Los Angeles, "Boston" carried on when Mike quit. A friendly restaurateur helped him design cylindrical aluminum carrying racks for his pies, mahogany-trimmed pie trucks. "They were simply beautiful," Pieman Strause remembers, "just like Pullman cars."
Just "fooling around," Pieman Strause one day invented chiffon pie. This and his beautiful pie trucks soon made him famed all along the West Coast. In 1924, when he was 23, he sold his business for $48,000 to two New Yorkers and became a pie consultant in Los Angeles. He now has an office in Manhattan and 38 permanent clients, ranging from a New York bakery which pays him $6,000 a year for three visits of at least three days each to smaller bakeries which pay $300 a year. Married to a pretty girl who has never baked a pie, "Boston" Strause lives in hotels, annoys his wife by ordering pie and taking it apart instead of eating it. He writes regular columns for Bakers Weekly, American Restaurant Magazine, International Stewards' and Caterers' Magazine. Between his rare flights of genius he settles down to adaptations, claims he can make 150 kinds of pie from cherries alone.
For the caterers last week '"Boston" Strause, aided by six assistants and a blackboard, demonstrated a method of making fresh apple pie by draining off the apple juice and sugar through a colander and pouring it back into the pie through holes in the crust while baking. He did not demonstrate his fresh strawberry pie, which he says "has never been revealed to the housewife." Recipe: use frozen fresh strawberries, freeze again immediately after cooking. The strawberries remain whole.
* "Sizzling platters" are made of an aluminum alloy. The hotter they are kept before being used the longer and more madly they will sizzle on contact with melted butter.